Blog Post - Studying Chemistry on the Astrophoria Foundation Year
Dr Rachel Quarrell
CEMS Course and Chemistry Lead
As a chemistry tutor at Oxford I do a lot of teaching, and this year I’m also helping to create the Astrophoria Foundation Year course. I'm an organic chemist specialising in medicinal chemistry and drug design. I used to apply combinatorial chemistry to create new drugs which inhibit enzymes and help defeat diseases such as malaria and emphysema. I have a passion for teaching chemistry at university level and showing students how to use its tools to understand and change the world around them.
So why chemistry? From this subject you can move into almost anything: medicine, computational modelling, theoretical physics, biochemistry, agrochemistry, geology, archaeology, forensics, neurochemistry, chemical engineering, pharmacology, pathology, energy science, law, business, teaching, politics, charity work and many other careers.
The Oxford chemistry degree is particularly broad and deep. Our students study a very wide range of subjects and delve into how chemistry works in fine detail. Options appear in the third year and the exceptional fourth year which is all new research. Students on it work hard but achieve a great deal. They work in a team with full-time academics for the whole of their fourth year, which also gives them plenty of transferrable skills and the chance to use the university’s incredible research facilities.
The foundation year which can lead to this degree, if passed at the required level, is going to look at how to understand the way atoms and molecules behave individually and together. Lectures, classes, tutorials and worksheets will be used to explore A-level chemistry in a university way. A 'toolkit' approach will equip students with the ability to study new areas themselves and apply their learning to many different types of molecule and chemistry situations. Students will also be taught how to understand, analyse and test scientific hypotheses and theories, and how to discuss and express their chemistry understanding.
Students will start by revisiting the foundations of inorganic and physical chemistry, then add organic chemistry concepts, along with studying the necessary integrated maths course in the first two terms to underpin such a technical subject. They’ll be doing laboratory practicals every two weeks, and improving their general university study skills. In the third term they will do an independent mini-project looking at one aspect of chemistry in detail, attending all-day lab practicals and seminar days, preparing to make the final transition to undergraduate chemistry.
There will be a chance to benefit from involvement with Oxford Chemistry’s outstanding Teaching Laboratory, with facilities including bench-top NMR spectrometers, and to engage with other sciences to broaden their experience. Meanwhile our students will be socialising with current undergraduates, living in a college and benefitting from all the opportunities Oxford has to offer.
The Astrophoria Foundation Year is a superb creation and I'm delighted to be involved with it.
